Phew, what a week. Meetup is back on our feet, and we feel like celebrating. So we’re doing what we love to do most: diving into the stories of local Meetup Groups.

Hundreds of Meetup Organizers and Members reached out to tell us about the difficulties they encountered during our recent service outage. Meetup’s Community Team is on the case, providing support and coaching. But we also decided to get creative and ask ourselves, what could we do with $300?

No doubt, this has been a tough weekend for Meetup. Since Thursday, we faced a massive attack on our servers — a DDoS attack, which is a barrage of traffic intended to make service unavailable. We’ve had many hours of downtime over several days, a first for us in 12 years of growing the world’s largest network of local community groups.

While the site was down, the Meetup community was not. There were over 60,000 Meetups during the outage period- people meeting up about what’s important in their lives- and saw an incredible outpouring of support.